Yom HaShoah: Past and Present

In honor of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is tomorrow, I wrote this short piece, which was Thursday's Ten Minutes of Torah.

Two years ago, I wrote this post on Yom HaShoah, and in 2009, this was my Yom HaShoah reflection.

As a witness to history, it is my responsibility to remember...on Yom HaShoah and always.

A Yom HaShoah Reflection for Our Times

This is the 2025 iteration of a message I post annually on Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day). If you can read only part of it, jump to the last paragraph.

In July of 2007, I volunteered to accompany a group of 48 NFTY-ites (the Reform Movement’s youth group in North America) on a L'dor v'Dor journey to Poland, the Czech Republic, and then on to Israel. (Crazy, I know.) One of our many visits to significant sites was a mass grave in the woods in Tikochin, three hours from Warsaw and two hours from the Lithuanian border. The time we spent there was, for me, perhaps the most difficult of the entire trip—and there were many difficult moments.

But those in the forest were personal.

My paternal grandfather, Abraham Charmatz was born in Lithuania, one of 19 children (yes, 19!). He was the youngest, and only a handful came to this country. (We originally believed that his name was changed to "Herman" at Ellis Island, but I have since learned from Dara Horn, author of "People Love Dead Jews," that it is a fallacy that names were changed there. According to Horn, they were changed afterward, and there are court records that prove her assertion. I have not searched court records for my grandfather's name change.)

To hear my father tell this part of our family's story, when he was growing up on Mapes Avenue in the Bronx in the 1930s and 1940s, his father frequently received letters from his brothers and sisters in Lithuania. Until the letters stopped.

I lit a yahrzeit candle at the mass grave in the woods in Tikochin, and today, once again, I remember all those unknown aunts and uncles and cousins. May they rest in peace in the shelter of the Eternal.

And while we're remembering, it would be wise to remember, too, that the current administration's efforts to "protect" Jews from antisemitism, especially on college campuses, are nothing more than a facade that tramples the civil rights of immigrants, many of whom are living and studying in this country legally and have the right—just like the rest of us—to assembly and free speech. In America, when those freedoms are denied to anyone, we all lose, and no one, including Jews, is safe from the forces that wish to see us gone—from this country or from the world.

Chaim Glasberg, z'l

It is late, I am tired, and the six yellow yahrzeit candles lit this morning in the office have long since burned out.  Indeed, this year's Yom HaShoah commemorations are over.

And yet, for those of us who have taken on the responsibility as witnesses to history, the remembrances continue from one 27 Nisan to the next.  Although I never knew him, I spent much of today imagining and remembering Chaim Glasberg.  In my mind, today is his yahrzeit, and so, as I do each year on this day, I offer this traditional prayer in his memory:

O God full of compassion, Eternal Spirit of the universe, grant perfect rest under the wings of Your Presence to our loved one, Chaim Glasberg, who has entered eternity.  Adonai, let him find refuge forever in the shadow of Your wings, and let his soul be bound up in the bond of eternal life.  The Eternal God is his inheritance.  May he rest in peace, and let us say:  Amen.